Sports' Biggest Guilty Pleasures

Let's face it: The life of a sports fan can be surprisingly exhausting. Depending on how many teams you support, nearly every month of the year can be a cavalcade of emotion as your favorite teams constantly alternate between giving you hope and crushing your dreams. 

For most of us, it's nearly impossible to keep the dial cranked up to "max" all the time. The prospect of holding all that resentment for divisional opponents, engaging in jersey-related rituals, fighting ridiculous battles on social media and participating in other assorted aspects of fan life is just too much.

Sometimes, you have to give in and enjoy the terrible and absurd rather than use them as motivation to be menacing or otherwise obnoxious. Maybe it's the latest headline-grabbing non-story or a message board filled with the type of rants you know you shouldn't be reading, but everyone has their vices. 

Here are some of sports' guiltiest pleasures.

Gossip

As sports fans, many of us like to think that we’re above the Kim Kardashian world of supermarket tabloids. But just because we don’t peruse Us Weekly in line with our groceries doesn’t mean we’re completely above the fray.

When it comes to gossip, sports fans aren’t much better as a whole than whatever group of brain-dead celebustalkers make up the Kardashian base. In fact, in certain situations we may even be worse.

Think about all the people hounded online for insider fantasy scoop or the skinny on draft picks—that’s all gossip. Locker-room drama, player arrests, (game) cheating scandals, marital infidelity, social media missteps and ostentatious displays of wealth—all gossip too.

Uniform Drama

The ever-changing landscape of college football uniforms has become a constant conversation topic throughout the season, with teams seemingly debuting a new look every other week. That is, of course, except for Oregon, which no longer wears the same uniform more than once per season.

With all the hype surrounding something that many consider trivial, social media is flooded with commentary most weeks. The snide mockers making wisecracks, the crotchety “get off my lawn!” sect complaining about purity of the game and the overly defensive fans fighting back against criticism—they all come together.

Rob Gronkowski

Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports

There are certain athletes who, despite playing for an almost universally loathed team, are as close to universally loved as exists in sports. Yankees great Derek Jeter is the perfect example of this phenomenon. Sure, his farewell tour in 2014 was inexplicably excessive but easy to forgive after nearly two decades of doing everything right.

That’s exactly why fondness for The Jeet can’t be considered a guilty pleasure—certainly not in the same way as our national obsession with a certain tight end in New England. Rob Gronkowski may play for the hated Patriots (sorry, Patriots fans, you know it’s true), but the guy is treated like a conquering hero anytime he shows up anywhere.

There are theoretical reasons why we shouldn’t like Gronk. He doesn’t read, but he “wrote” a book. He’s not traditionally well-spoken, but he talks a lot. The Patriots favor a low profile for players, but Gronk is hosting his own cruise next February. That kind of paradoxical behavior doesn’t usually play well for athletes, but we eat everything this guy does up with a spoon. Such is Gronk.

ESPY Awards

Richard Shotwell/Associated Press

Sure, a lot of people complain about the overwhelming television dominance of ESPN, and basically anything and everything it ever does, but that doesn’t stop most of us from tuning in. If only because there aren’t a whole host of other options for 24-hour sports programming.

Take the recent ESPY Awards, for example, which is supposedly a celebration of all things sports but in actuality is an annual celebration of all things ESPN. The 2015 broadcast was moved to ABC prime time, and ratings soared—7.7 million viewers tuned in between 8 and 11 p.m., up from 5 million from last year.

Twitter Trash-Talking

It used to be that if a team lost a particularly brutal game, recourse for your average fan was limited. One could, of course, yell passionately and fruitlessly at the television, as one does. Getting drunk was (and remains) another top-notch option. And if all else failed, there was always calling into a local sports show to vent.

Today, there are substantially more avenues for belligerent fans to express their belligerence, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. Having a direct line of communication between a fanbase and, for example, an NFL kicker after he shanks what would have been a game-winning kick in January is a recipe for truly indefensible death threats.

There are plenty of fans who don’t even need an excuse to go online and dump on athletes or members of the sports media. Jimmy Kimmel’s hilarious recurring Mean Tweets segment is the perfect example of that. Twitter has become the dumping ground for every terribly mean thing that people think but would never actually say to another person’s face.

Following Social Media Drama

Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

Most of us lead lives in which the only thing especially noteworthy is just how banal they are. Although social media originated as a way to keep us in touch with people we know, these days it’s just as much about allowing us to keep up with people we don’t know.

Twitter and Instagram have brought fans and professional athletes closer together than ever. Millions of fans take full advantage of that newfound proximity, monitoring every move of their favorite (and least favorite) athletes.

These days, nothing is off limits. Hostile communication with trolls and journalists, flirty exchanges with random strangers and even the following/unfollowing activity of athletes are all watched by someone somewhere.

Social media activity has become an endless source of news, thanks in large part to the creepily vigilant monitoring. And the more reckless and abrasive athletes are, the more likely we are to follow them. 

Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue

Evan Agostini/Associated Press

The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue has been one of sports' biggest guilty pleasures for decades. While the Internet has been slowly putting the skin mag industry out of business, the swimsuit issue, and the whole dog-and-pony show leading up to its annual February publication, only seems to be growing.

We’re not just talking about pictures in a magazine. There’s the cover girl(s) announcement and subsequent press tour, bicoastal release parties, supplemental behind-the-scenes videos and plenty of headline-grabbing locales—Kate Upton has been photographed in Antarctica and zero-G.

Honestly, leering at the Swimsuit Issue is probably an even bigger guilty pleasure than leafing through the pages of Playboy, because there’s absolutely no way anyone could claim to read it for the articles.

ESPN the Magazine's Annual Body Issue

Diane Bondareff/Associated Press

Speaking of magazines you don’t read for the articles, ESPN The Magazine’s annual Body Issue has taken the Swimsuit Issue’s winning formula for showing skin and exploited a loophole that allows it to skip the formality of the bathing suit altogether.

While there simply isn’t a legitimate sports reason for supermodels to get naked in the pages of Sports Illustrated, there’s less of a disconnect when the models are replaced with athletes. ESPN’s inclusion of male athletes and willingness to embrace a broader range of physiques make the whole thing a bit more palatable.

Ballers

Despite that admitting it to themselves, let alone others, would bring shame upon our families, millions of people out there who religiously watched the HBO bro-fest Entourage—all eight seasons (maybe two of which were legitimately good).

Maybe we (and by we, I mean me) didn’t like it enough to prioritize seeing the movie at the theater in June, but we (and by we, again I mean me) are definitely planning to watch it the night it premieres on HBO. Entourage was the guiltiest of (scripted) TV pleasures, and so is Ballers, which is basically Entourage for football.

Basically, it’s a dream come true for fans of tool-centered programming and sports. In fact, Ballers is better because The Rock’s Spencer Strasmore is a better character than E and Vince combined.

Annual Puppy Bowl

Stephen J. Boitano/Associated Press

The reality of the Super Bowl is that every year there are 30 teams with 30 fanbases left on the outside looking in. Ratings suggest that loserdom alone isn’t enough to stop people from tuning in—the ridiculous over-the-top commercials and elaborate halftime hullabaloo tend to distract from that harsh reality.

That being said, for some of us, that noise is so loud that we actually need a distraction from the distractions. Enter: Puppy Bowl. Animal Planet has been airing the delightfully adorable alternative to the NFL’s official programming since 2005. Those puppies soothed a lot of souls who flipped over in frustration after the Patriots won another Super Bowl in February.

Tim Tebow

Michael Perez/Associated Press

For being an ethically pleasing, genuinely friendly guy of marginal talent, Eagles quarterback Tim Tebow sure does stir up a surprising amount of emotion. People who love Tim Tebow, love Tim Tebow, usually to an excessive degree. Those who hate Tim Tebow, hate Tim Tebow, also to an excessive degree.

Either way, it’s way too much intensity over a guy who has completed a grand total of 173 passes in the five seasons since being drafted. Love him or hate him, at this point most of us are invested one way or the other. There’s just something about him that’s fundamentally captivating—like a slow-motion car accident giving you a big friendly hug.

Watching Feuds Play out on the Field

Associated Press

With more athletes and coaches than ever giving us nothing beyond, “We’re just doing all we can do to prepare for next week,” off-the-field drama (besides arrests) is becoming an endangered species.

That is probably why we cherish even the dumbest of feuds so much—it doesn’t get much dumber than the comically trivial selfie feud that has been burning between Titans quarterback Zach Mettenberger and Texans defensive end J.J. Watt for almost a year now.

Recently reopened by Mettenberger, the whole thing is very junior high, but their biannual meetings need any bit of added excitement they can get. Tennessee vs. Houston is unlikely to ever be considered a marquee matchup, with the last two years having been particularly tragic. Watt leveling Mettenberger is about as good as it gets.

Fantasy Sports

Brian Ach/Associated Press

Most people who participate in fantasy sports on a regular basis are harboring some level of self-loathing about the time, effort and money they put into such an inconsequential activity. And please don’t even start—just because you were dumb enough to agree to a Tim Tebow centaur tattoo doesn’t make your fantasy league significant to the universe at large.

In fact, the insignificance of this obsessive national pastime is right there in the title. Merriam-Webster.cm defines fantasy as “something that is produced by the imagination; an idea about doing something that is far removed from reality; the act of imagining something.” So when you’re rooting against your real team due to implications for your fantasy team and someone calls you out for being deranged, just know that you are.

But also know that there’s nothing wrong with devoting a reasonable amount of time to fantasy sports as a hobby. If having an absolute foundation in reality was a requirement to legitimize hobbies, there wouldn’t be a whole lot to choose from.

Black Monday

Ed Szczepanski-USA TODAY Sports

Maybe it’s the antidote to eight weeks of holiday spirit, or perhaps it’s just schadenfreude run amok, but Black Monday (the Monday following the last NFL game of the regular season) has become its own grim holiday of sorts.

Every year, football fans across the country find themselves glued to the steady stream of information coming from Adam Schefter’s Twitter account—and in recent years, it's been an absolute bloodbath. 

Some are desperately hoping for a move that will finally turn around the fortunes of their chronically downtrodden teams or at least provide a brief glimmer of hope to get them through the winter, while others seem to enjoy giggling at the misfortune of others.

Hating on Who We Hate

Yes, haters are, in fact, going to hate. The view is probably nice from atop your high horse, but don’t even try to pretend you’re too classy to get knee-deep in the muck, at least every now and then. Maybe you’re not a full-time muckraker, but show me a man who claims to have never raked the muck, and I’ll show you a liar.

The mere act of being a sports fan means that you’re filled with love, loyalty and passion for your team, its players and the city in which they reside. It’s only natural to counterbalance all that good with a little bad. We all have athletes whom, for whatever reason, we completely hate. For me, one of them is Dwight Howard.